7Dec 14

When surface-similar acts emerge at the same time, there’s an urge to paint them as rivals – not just personally but aesthetically. A pop moment becomes such when you have points to draw a line between. How much of this is marketing strategy, how much media shorthand, and how much the micropolitics of fandom? It’s hard to say. All we know for sure is that Christina Aguilera’s own strong-willed progression towards a singing career was swiftly and sharply reshaped to fit a story about an emerging generation of new teenpop stars. And in particular, she was compared to Britney Spears: the women’s shared Mouseketeer background making the pairing irresistible.

But the lines of this division were never well-drawn. They rested too much on these 1999 first impressions. What “Britney and Xtina” really have in common is the difference between the music they imagined they’d make, the music they ended up building a long-term career on, and the singles in between that made them famous. Just as Spears fancied singing husky Southern MOR more than dance-pop, Aguilera was shaping herself up as a big-voiced soundtrack artist, with a song for Disney’s Mulan her initial breakthrough, and she would later tack hard away from “Genie In A Bottle”’s modern bubblegum sound. Watching her 1999 interviews, she reminds me of an elite athlete as much as a pop star – much talk of focus and preparedness and a level-headed understanding that the real challenge is sustaining the peak, even more than reaching it.

The comparison points between the two artists fell on a very old, familiar scale: the authentic and the inauthentic, the popular favourite and the connoisseur’s pick, the “manufactured” and the “genuine talent”. These all spun out of one tough-to-deny point – Aguilera was the technically better singer – and a far more rickety comparison between Britney’s exaggerated wholesomeness and Christina’s slightly more worldly material. In fact, both women’s breakthroughs were products of compromise – dance-pop was required and dance-pop is what Christina got.

Where she got lucky, though, is making her debut at a moment when the idea of what made-to-order dance-pop might be was dramatically tilting. “Genie In A Bottle” is following a playbook of 90s pop number ones stretching all the way back to “The Right Stuff” – reaching across for inspiration to the R&B or hip-hop charts. But where such moves often sounded comically awkward, the music “Genie” is partly drawing on for its production ideas – the futurist R&B of Destiny’s Child, TLC, Aaliyah et al – is a tremendous fit for pop vocalists: interesting enough to let weaker singers sink into the production, while creating a gymnasium for stronger ones.

“Genie In A Bottle” isn’t that kind of modern R&B track, though. The reason the Freelance Hellraiser’s graft of Christina’s vocals onto the Strokes’ “Hard To Explain” in 2002 worked so well is that “Genie” is a production-agnostic pop song – structurally straightforward and never built around its production in the way an Aaliyah or Kelis hit might be. The borrowings from R&B – the stuttering rhythm lines and staccato keyboard s – are basically decorative, reminders of a thrilling sound rather than attempts to engage it. But they mesh wonderfully with all the other decoration that’s thrown in here – the introductory piano flourish, and the gorgeous splashes of Latin Freestyle synth before the “My body’s saying let’s go…” line. And R&B is so fertile in 1999 that even something half-reminiscent of it can end up one of the most exciting pop records of the year.

Faced with all this ornamentation, and a genre that she doesn’t particularly care about anyhow, Aguilera goes rococo herself, treating the song as a showcase, matching it curlicue for curlicue. For the first half of “Genie” she’s mostly ticking off the fact that, yes, she can do teenpop very well if she’s asked to – though if there’s a flaw in the song it’s that she’s no melodramatist, and the “racing” hormones sound as under control as anything else. At the back end, though, Aguilera shifts gear, offering a delirium of overlapping vocal lines and tones and tricks all tumbling over each other to match the song’s bombast. It’s marvellous – and like “Baby One More Time”, “Genie In A Bottle” is a hell of a calling card. Unlike “Baby One More Time”, it’s slightly more impressive for the futures it seems to promise – pop that surrenders more fully to R&B; Christina Aguilera songs built for her – than the present it delivers.

Comments

The success of Idina Menzel’s version of “Let It Go” over Demi Lovato finally proved something I had always strongly suspected: That the “pop-friendly” versions of Disney songs were superfluous and given the choice, most people would choose the real thing every time. Before single songs became widely available via MP3 purchases and streamings, only the watered-down versions were ever released as singles so this market was effectively invisible outside of sales of the whole soundtrack. I wonder if Disney will stop producing the pop versions moving forward.

In the US, Menzel peaked at #5 and stuck around the chart for ages while Lovato stumbled to #38 and was gone quickly. I’ve heard Menzel on the radio, although not until she was already in the top 10 since as usual programmers were hesitant to add a recording that sounded so different from almost everything else they play. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Lovato’s version on the radio.

I prefer this to a lot of what followed. I found her voice a bit too foghorn-ish, even rather mucous-y on her bigger-sounding songs. The production deserves a lot of credit for why ‘Genie in a Bottle’ still sounds so confident.

Anyway, Christina. It’s a lovely debut to these ears, with some interesting latinesque (?) flourishes. I would say my main memory of this was a radio staple that kinda crept up on me, not thinking much of it until after maybe half a dozen plays until I realised Christina had charmed her way into my consciousness. I’m probably going to be like many others who will come across upcoming Xtina bunnies and mark down accordingly. In the meantime, 8 is pretty bang on.

#32: If anything, he’s more prevalent (at least in Popular terms) as one of the leading producers of the futurist-R&B sound – which, to go back to the original topic, is the sound “Genie In A Bottle” is aping. I think he’s still bunnied as a singer until 2013, but I imagine he has a production credit on at least one bunny between now and then.

#31 – But here’s the thing, *is* “Let It Go” that different from some of the ballads that do get radio airplay? And if it is, *how* is it? That’s actually a very interesting question.

Vocally, Idina Menzel wouldn’t sound much out of place amidst the likes of Aguilera and the talent-show successors of whom we’ll see a lot more – at a push I’d say her delivery has something stagey about it in that she’s enunciating almost to a fault, but as I noted in my initial derailing comment, she’s pretty much operating from the same playbook (and certainly using some of the same tricks) as Aguilera et al., and I’m pretty sure each of them could happily handle material meant for the other. (How long you’d have to lock Aguilera in a studio for to get her to sing “Let It Go” in an actually sing-a-longable form is anyone’s guess, but it’d probably work if you could. A Menzel cover of Bunnied Aguilera Ballad almost certainly would.)

With that said, there’s enough of a perception of a difference that one of the other workshops run by the aforementioned Anne-Marie Speed – the “Pop and Studio Day” – is focused on how musical theatre singers can adapt to pop music, with an assumption that “getting rid of the MT sound” is part of this. This is despite the fact that the teaching methodology she uses – the Estill Model, essentially an attempted unified theory of the voice and how it sounds different as you use it differently – is both very common in Speed’s home field of musical theatre and increasingly in the training of pop singers, especially now in the stage school era we talked about with Billie where the early training of pop singers very often is in MT. (The other common teaching methodology for pop singers, Speech Level Singing, has some fairly substantial differences with Estill, and it’s notable that in Speed’s time under Cowell a currently-bunnied member of that year’s coaching panel who had her acts work with her – SLS-using – vocal coach “to gain an edge” ended up with her coming nowhere near winning despite the consensus strongest category, the pre-live-show favourite apparently reporting being “confused by the coaching.” Not sure how much SLS is or was used in MT, although the answer isn’t “not at all” because I’ve had a couple of one-off lessons with SLS-using teachers with an MT background.)

#21 And to tie all of *those* together, Menzel was a Cowell show guest last night! Plugging her Christmas album via a duet with (checks for bunnies…) Michael Bublé. Annoyingly, of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” which is the song that puts me off buying or Christmas-listing that album. I just can’t help thinking of Menzel responding to Bublé by snapping back to Elsa and insisting the cold never bothered her anyway…

It well may be* that in the 21st century (and “Genie In A Bottle” is clearly one of those 1999 hits that foreshadows the next decade, in the same way that the 2010s synth-pop sound really emerges with some 2009 bunnies) pop singers and musical theatre singers are essentially using the same technical tools for different ends. Might the difference, in fact, come down to the difference between a live orchestra and recording studio production? Fortunately, we can look at this through both directions – “stage singers do pop” is a frequent occurrence because of the rise of the pop jukebox musical (though the best-known example of that is based on the songs of a band with its own distinctive vocal histrionics), and Menzel has a pop album, “I Stand,” which was largely a co-write with Glen Ballard (previous reputation: producing and co-writing “Jagged Little Pill” and at least part of “Bad” and “Thriller”).

* word order entirely deliberate in context of discussing Menzel… and I had a couple of minutes being *convinced* she was indirectly bunnied by association with a US TV show, but a quick check suggests that isn’t the case.

Wonderful stuff, one that I’m surprised was a big summer hit in the States as it fits much more with a melancholic autumn feel. Not quite as good as the Britney behemoth, but my favourite track of Christina’s and a classic (and forward thinking) of the class of ’99.

#35 Thanks for the analysis. I’m nowhere near enough a music theorist to figure out how or why showtunes sound different from “standard” pop music on the radio, I just know that they do. Of course, showtune-sounding pop music is no stranger to the top of the charts – ABBA being an obvious example.

If all was fair in love and pop, I would be able to get through talking about this track without talking about a certain miss Britney Jean Spears. As it isn’t, I’m unable to and Aguilera was always going to suffer from being second out of the bat in relation to Britney who was already practically a household name by this point (though, I’d pity the likes of Mandy Moore and Jessica Simpson more – they never stood a chance with such fierce competition). In the UK anyway, Christina’s never been as popular as Britney though weirdly in the U.S. it seems she was so for a while; all the singles from her first album went into the Billboard Hot 100 Top 3 whilst many of Britney’s post ‘BOMT’ seem to linger in the low Top 10/Top 20 range (though clearly, Spears was miles ahead on album sales)

‘Genie in a Bottle’ is an OK pop song, it can’t compare with ‘Baby..’not that it really should have too, but it’s being sung by a singer who doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with being a blonde bubblegum pop princess. Britney always seemed more comfortable being that than Aguilera did because, let’s face it, Britney’s never really been all that talented. She’s a decent enough singer and dancer, but she’s not a song-writer or producer and seemed perfectly happy to let her career be run by the man upstairs whilst occasionally taking over and being assertive. Aguilera was never happy with that, at least as far as I can tell. She’s a better singer, and she wanted more control of her career and her first era always seems to be her coasting until she reaches something better. Which she does, but more on that when we reach it. But within the confides of 1999, Aguilera’s being put into a battle that she can’t ever hope to win. She’s not the shy, innocent 18-year old ingenue that Britney was and it shows, even now, as ‘Genie’ seems a hell of a lot more suggestive than anything Britney did until ‘Slave 4 U’

Also, to wade in on the ‘Frozen’ discussion, I do like “Let It Go” but it’s certainly not my favourite from the soundtrack. That dubious honor goes to “The First Time in Forever” which is quite lovely, and Kristen Bell has a surprisingly decent voice. Don’t have much time for anything else on the soundtrack though.

I never thought about this before but maybe the singer that Christina should have been competing against wasn’t Britney at all, but a certain woman from the other (i.e. my) end of Pennsylvania who was about the same age but hadn’t yet hit her stride in 1999. They even performed on the same bunnied hit (and apparently developed a feud during its recording). An example of the direction Christina could’ve gone in perhaps?

I don’t like this at normal radio/tv volumes, but when you get GIAB though headphones or at club volumes then the adventurous kick drum (maybe the most fun since Blue Monday’s or even Bonham’s in ‘Good Times/Bad Times’) becomes a *huge* hook, balancing all the keyboards and vocals, and sells the track. In some respects this feels like a model for the dual-prongedness of Aguilera’s initial impact. She could sing up a storm, but a lot of people, esp. guys are relatively immune to that. But she also could swing/shimmy those hips like nobody’s business (this doesn’t come through much in GIAB’s vid. but her subsequent vids would go to that well almost every time – show me someone who doesn’t like ‘Come on Over’ and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t seen the first minute of its vid.) and had a surprisingly sexual presence for someone so tiny and skinny and young. And everybody, but guys especially, noticed that. The upshot in the US at least was that Aguilera amazing quickly became a consensus popster that almost everybody, both sexes and most ages could tolerate and even like quite a bit (whereas Britney’s and Backstreet’s appeals both skewed younger). GIAB remains a record that I admire rather than love (I feel the same way about ‘Bills, Bills, Bills’ as it happens; I bought ‘Unpretty’ around this time by way of comparison). The barely there Middle 8 is a demerit (although ‘Unpretty’ didn’t do much better now I think about it) and I’ve never liked the brassy synth in the second half of the verses and in the choruses, so just scraping in with a:
7

Took me a while to work out that liking Christina Aguilera wasn’t that skeevy (I’m only three months older than her, apparently).

Took me a while longer to realise that I actually thought she was pretty good – right up until the release of I Turn To You, in fact (a song that reduced me to tears in about two listens). As noted, she always seemed more comfortable belting out film soundtracks than bouncing around the poppy stuff – I Turn To You is a classic Diane Warren composition originally recorded by All-4-One for the Space Jam OST, although it was arguably more classic when recorded by Celine Dion and called Because You Loved Me – and the single edit of Come On Over is particularly wretched (album version’s pretty good though).

In the meantime, Genie In A Bottle was a relatively slow burner for me – as a 19-year-old uni student the video had relatively easy appeal but the song took a while to get into. Reanalysing the lyrics properly fifteen years later reveals much; as brashly sexual as “gotta rub me the right way” sounds, the song is actually surprisingly nervy. “My body’s sayin’ let’s go / but my heart is sayin’ no” (shame Tom, recheck the lyrics) is the repeated key; physically ready but emotionally uncertain (“hormones racing at the speed of light / but that don’t mean it’s gotta be tonight”). Not a girl, not yet a woman – oh wait, that was the other one.

Christina Aguilera has always appeared a lot more trashy compared to the classy Britney but as someone suggested Moore and Simpson especially suffered by arriving on the scene at the same time but they were pretty much Britney clones and had to settle for 2nd best.

Bar 1999 of course neither Christina or Britney really crossed swords at the same time a la Blur/Oasis. Every second year/third year from 2000-09 roughly was more or less one or the other on form so the rivalry was a bit overstated. If anything Christina has been in the shadows since the arrival of Lady ‘Bunny’.

Christina should have the more interesting career given the change of styles but it just has never done much for me at all. Like the sort of girl you were warned to stay away from. We’ll get to the bunnies in due course but in 2002 with the ghastly red light district image and 2006(non bunnied admittedly) especially Aguileira was overexposed beyond belief. One of the last big names of the fading Compact Disc era.Good singer and great presence but ‘Meh’.

X Factor comparisons are a given but Stars in their Eyes would be more like it. Tonight Matthew I’m Going To Be….

However GIAB is a surprise at just how vibrant it is and it makes me wish that she made a lot more records like this compared to some of the dreary output of the next decade.A step into the big bad world and succeeding.A bit like Usher with You Make Me Wanna being a slight glimpse of the dominance that followed and moving on to bigger things. Only Aguilera never really betters GIAB.Everything in its right place.

Unsure as to what to say about this when it came up at the time, I think I’ve finally got something to say.

The Freelance Hellraiser version of this is the one that I know back to front – to the extent that I barely remembered the original version’s backing at all before re-listening to it – and it’s still a high-water mark of the mash up scene in my view. The tension in the lyrics identified by Kinitawowi plays out with the racing guitars standing in for teenage hormones, cleverly sitting on the same chords and offering none of the changes that the Strokes play out over the course of their song, and thus keeping it claustrophobic. Even the title of The Strokes song used works well in describing the mental collisions that can happen when teenagers start to confront sex as more than a theoretical act.

It was thus with some surprise that on returning to the original that I discovered something that I think, though slightly flawed (as with Swanstep, I’m not a fan of the synthy sounding horns) is a bit of a winner production wise. There’s lots of different elements in there – piano flourishes, that kick drum/bassline burbling away underneath, subtle synth lines – yet it still provides a remarkable amount of space for Christina Aguilera to do her thing, especially on the verses. I’m not a fan of over-emoting either, so the restraint shown here was most welcome – I suspect that the producer may have had a hand here, given what comes from Christina in future entries when she may well have had more of a hand in deciding how to tackle the songs. I even think that that the slight underselling of the first chorus is a solid choice – the longer the song goes on, the more interested she becomes in getting her point across in the chorus. It’s not quite holding the tension between hormones and thoughts in the same way that Freelance Hellraiser manages but it’s doing a similar job, I think. All in all, much more than good; I’d even think about elevating it above the mash up now.

Other things raised in the thread: other US pop singers out of the gate after Britney. Mandy Moore now only really singing back up on her husband’s albums – and, at that, seemingly only really on the songs that are about relationships turning south (looking at the liner notes for Ryan Adams’ latest) – not that this is any indication of trouble in paradise as far as I am aware (also Ryan Adam’s latest a much better Tom Petty rip than The Strokes ever managed). No new album from Mandy Moore since 2009 at least and more likely to be found doing voice acting for children’s TV shows. Similarly, Jessica Simpson – no new album since 2010 and seemingly more interested in TV herself now too. Is anyone weeping for the lost records from these artists?

On bootlegs: typical record industry thought c. 2000 – bootlegs/mashups were being heavily frowned upon by the BPI. Sniffy pronouncements about how when you buy a record, it’s for listening to, not for altering in any way, being made in the press and the like. Of course, to me, this just made the whole scene seem more exciting and, in the end, of course, they wound up co-opting people into the mainstream from the culture. More anon, obviously.

Let It Go/Frozen: this one rumbles on and on. Disney set to make big profits this year, as kids are still massively into Frozen and want the toys, the outfits, the books, etc. In this respect, it’s not a problem that it didn’t go to #1 for them I would suspect. Indeed, the long running engagement with the property, on the terms of the child, may well be helping them, rather than making one big bang and then it dissipating thereafter.

Re47: The early Mandy Moore stuff seem to take Britney’s vocal tics and exaggerate them way past bearable. But unlike Jessica Simpson, her subsequent acting and music career felt like she was trying to do something interesting, if rarely getting there (e.g. appearing in Richard Kelly’s notorious/fascinating but often unwatchable flop Southland Tales). I like this, the single from her last (so far) album.
(The one thing that did set her apart from Britney, Xtina and Jessica, was, of course, that (physically) she towers above them. As William Goldman suggested, showbiz is that rare area of life where being shorter works in your favour).

#47 I don’t recall any specific rhetoric from the BPI re mash-ups but any wholesale dismissal would’ve been absurd given the long-established inclusion of ‘a capella’ and instrumental versions on many single releases especially within hip hop, r&b and house.

Not that they were wrong to be concerned with the democratisation of the process and the increased availability of the materials through illegal channels though, regardless of how many good and/or bad mashes materialised…

Late ’99 is when I first started making them and hearing them more regularly outside of more single-genre mixes. I heard one of the Beastie Boys “Intergalactic” vocals over a number of disco/funk hits (“Oh What A Night”, “You Sexy Thing”) through a friend and this plus MTV’s audacious and ambitious Megamix show stringing and splicing together dozens of dance hits (a few examples of which are on YouTube and a follow on from their brilliant MTV Party Zone Massive mixes) inspired me to have a go. When the first Erol Alkan mash-ups, “A Stroke Of Genieus” and Osymyso’s “Intro Inspection” started getting XFM airplay a little later I knew this was the (next) bandwagon for me :)

The mashup scene is probably the only scene I was properly a part of in my whole music fandom – though just as a consumer, club goer and internet user – as I was too young and out of the metropolitan area to be really part of the Britpop scene. Credit to you for getting involved. The slight lawlessness of it all, the democratisation of the process as you put it, and the sense that you could hear something startling that changed the way you perceived hitherto pigeon-holed tracks (or even whole genres) was genuinely exciting. It opened doors for me to music that I perhaps wouldn’t have bothered with (due to the – perhaps – usual teenage closedmindedness to stuff outside my comfort zone), so it was important for me. But most importantly, it was fun – at a time when the music that I had been listening to and enjoying (Britpop essentially) got more and more mired in joylessness, it was brilliant to be listening to the radio or be in a club and hear something that made you smile, laugh or just cheer. If it were logistically possible to go around and just say thanks to all the people that did stuff that got that reaction from me, I’d do it (sadly age and responsibilities preclude an opportunity for such an adventure – the stuff a mediocre blog could be made of I guess). On that basis alone, the BPI were always going to be fighting a losing battle, in my view.

#48: I forgot that Mandy Moore was in Southland Tales – I’ve got that on DVD somewhere at home; I can’t even remember why I have it, as it is notoriously badly reviewed. I seem to remember that the story picks up in media res and if you really want to know what the hell is going on, you need to have bought and read three prequel comic books – this is not helpful in terms of attracting a wider audience obviously. Maybe I should dig it out again – the only bit that really stuck out in my mind was Justin Timberlake lip-synching to The Killers in one of the best bits of the film – certainly the bit that was most visually arresting.

That song’s alright. A bit indie-pop – better than I remember her rather breathy vocals from when she was a pop star. I think that indie-ish direction led to her meeting Ryan Adams in the first place to be honest. I can’t think that there are too many places where Ryan Adams and Mandy Moore’s pop incarnation would meet – but that could be just my own lack of imagination.

Having looked at her filmography, she was the voice of Rapunzel in Disney’s Tangled as well and sang the big number on that one – and then we’re obliquely back to Frozen, as this conversation dances around in circles.

Re51: I really wanted to like Southland Tales – I like the idea of people still having a go at that late-’60s style madness. But it’s a total shambles. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice (out already in the US, I think, and here in January) is, I reckon, an object lesson in how you can create an atmosphere of drug-fuelled paranoia and belief in assorted conspiracy theories, with seemingly dozens of characters, while the director actually remains precisely in control of everything .

Re:47. Turns out, as ever, I know nothing – given that Mandy Moore and Ryan Adams are divorcing.

It’s really turned me around on the lyrics on that album and the gig that I saw Ryan do in London prior to Christmas. It now seems like a classic break up album with lyrics asking himself some pretty difficult and interesting questions (I was messed up and taking too many drugs before getting married; if this relationship ends, will I be able to hold it together? being a key theme of at least two of the tracks) and the set list that he has been hawking around on tour (playing most of his new album and several of the break up songs from his previous albums – including one that hasn’t been released yet) continues the theme. For a guy who won’t talk about his personal life, famously hanging up on an interviewer who asked one question too many about his wife (i.e. asking question number 2 about his wife after being told that he doesn’t talk about her), he appears to wear his heart on his sleeve with his songs. I’m seeing him again in a few weeks – it will be interesting to see whether he switches things up.

I also wonder whether Mandy will go back to making music now or whether she’s going to continue her (voice) acting career. Interesting times.

I’ve always wondered if this was a subtle Spice Girls homage, given the ‘wanna be’ hook and pop-feminist lyrics, but I’ve never seen anyone else suggest this.

It’s a very appealing piece of work in any case-not as attention-grabbing as a Max Martin production but everything is in the right place. Eight seems right to me. While I’m not holding this against it, it also belongs in the classic pop genre of songs that are happy to talk about doing things to your/my body but not ready to go into further detail.

[…] 18 October 1999. Tom Ewing’s Popular tells me Christina Aguilera is at #1 with Genie in a Bottle. She’s mostly interesting at this point in terms of her rivalry with Britney, and that, in turn, […]

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